Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

sha* (with sha1pass and shasum): Sha-sha-sha

I mentioned md5sum a long, long time ago, and now I feel obligated to include the sha* suite. I think this might be where the free ride ends for checksum generators though. Here’s why:

That’s it, that’s basically all it does. Of course, it’s not like md5sum did much more. You can use this in much the same way as md5sum — checking file integrity where the publisher has a sum available to match, or as a fingerprinting utility where there was an intermediary in the transfer.

I wanted to point out that the sha* binaries are part of coreutils, but my Arch system has two other sha* programs: sha1pass, installed as part of syslinux, and shasum, which came with perl.

I can’t speak for either of those last programs, since I’m not sure what their original intent was. I have a feeling sha1pass works with passwords and encryption, while shasum appears to be a frontend for the sha* binaries. If you use sha* enough, shasum might be helpful.

But that’s why I said the gravy train might be pulling into the station for checksum generators: They have a very slim and specific function. And what I’ve seen of a few other checksum generators suggests that’s all they’re meant to do.

It’s possible. I don’t recall coming across sha1pass in the past. On Arch it’s part of syslinux, but I don’t think I’ve used anything but grub outside of Arch, so I’d have to check if it’s in syslinux in other distros.

syslinux had a lot of use in “old days”, with linux distros living in the hard disk along Win95 and Win98 FAT partitions. It was also very used in the first Live CDs that booted as floppy emulation. But now you will see ISOLINUX in liveDVDs and Grub[12] in disk installations (well, i prefer LILO).

There is a last bastion in syslinux usage: USB pendrives, for linux installations or live USB drives.

If you followed the procedure of the wiki, you did use the ‘syslinux-install_update’ script to install syslinux. The ‘syslinux-install_update’ script is Arch specific, and is not provided/supported by Syslinux upstream.